Here's a topic guaranteed to start controversy. Which Linux distribution is best? It all depends on your criteria for judging. Even then the topic is highly subjective. Here are a few nominees for "best distro" in specific categories.

Also, Debian didn't have APT from the start. First APT release was in 1998.

Sorry you are right, I knew that already but what I meant to say is that Debian had it from the start from before YDL developed Yum or redhat even standardised on the yum method not as in the very start of the Debian Linux Release.

Why? Both deb and rpm gets the job done pretty much equally well

Absolutely they do, I completely agree but its such a waste of time having to package the same program in 2 different formats to satisfy what is essentially 1 operating system. I have always wished for this, it just makes sense to unify the formats rather than continue supporting two different formats, even if its something like the Free Desktop manifesto where standards are drawn up, so duplication of effort and work is removed / drastically reduced I think we the users / maintainers / developers would all benefit from a unified / standard package management system. Not that all management systems should be removed diversity is a good thing but if there is a set standard then while there can be diversity all systems can understand packages built to this set specification, if that makes sense.

Absolutely they do, I completely agree but its such a waste of time having to package the same program in 2 different formats to satisfy what is essentially 1 operating system.

Even if every Linux system used the same package format it would not solve the problem.

For example, Ubuntu 12 has moved to using an entirely new directory for .so libraries. How would you build a package that could install on Ubuntu 12 and on Debian and on Fedora, when all of them have slightly different file locations? And you cannot just define a %lib% macro because some programs need hard-coded file paths built into the binary.

Also, programs need to be built against different library versions. Some distros may be using libcurl.so.4 while others use libcurl.so.3. Or openssl vs gnutls.